CLICK is back!

Hello again, faithful CLICK fans! I know that you're probably looking at me the way a child looks at a deadbeat dad who stopped home to give his little tots a cheap gumball machine toy for Christmas before disappearing again. But I want you to know -- thanks to my Web site's search engine tracking, I have felt your pain and I now realize that you never left me even though I left you. I'm now back for good!

For those of you who are new to this site, I owe an explanation. Back in 1997, Rob Pegoraro from The Washington Post was trying to get rid of a column called "Click" that he wrote for the Style section. The focus of the site was wacky Web sites. At the time, I was working on a site on washingtonpost.com called Interact (later named Technology Post), and would sometimes feature similar stuff. When I left washingtonpost.com, Rob called to ask if I would please, please, please take over the column so he could spend time on his new job as Editor of Fast Forward. I agreed -- and wrote the weekly column for about two years until they canceled the entire page the column was on. (It's OK Joel -- I know you tried your best to keep that eclectic Surfing section around).

At that time, I decided it would be nice to put all of those columns online. I got permission from The Washington Post to do this, then set up Click: Strange Stuff for Idle Minds. I continued to keep my regular schedule of posting a strange site every week, and even developed a newsletter. A lot of you came to the site, and everything was happy happy. And then ... along came AOL. I quickly got too busy and couldn't even find time to surf for fun sites, let alone write about them. The site lived on, but in disrepair. And then, time forgot it.

But you didn't forget it! I discovered this today from my bed, where I have been lying recovering from a virus from Mars that I picked up from my 2-year-old daughter. While surfing around through the Futureforecast.com site stats, I discovered that CLICK-related keywords are one of the main draws to Futureforecast.com. Here's just a smattering of the kinds of things you all have been searching for:

• tamagotchi/masktchi
• funny clicks
• strange
• stuff
• strange strange stuff
  
• idle minds

On top of that, 107 of you went to the futureforecast.com/click directory last week alone. (Curiously, a lot of people also come to my domain searching for information about John Wilkes Booth, thanks to a story I did about him for The Denver Post back in 1995). There are some funny search keywords for him -- my favorite being, "exhumation abe lincoln" and "mummified bodies." Um, can I just say for a second that you Booth Sleuths are a little creepy and weird?

So anyway, thanks to you, CLICK is back. I will start it as a blog with one post a week that features a wacky web site. Thanks to the advent of blogging, this will be a heck of a lot easier than it was in the old days, when I had to go into Dreamweaver and edit HTML (yuck!)

If enough of you hang around, I may also try to make this a little interactive and let you highlight your own favorite wacky sites. There are also a lot of tools that make this easier.

So let's get started! My next post will be for a wacky web site I found just this morning. Thank goodness for laryngitis and bed rest!